Month: November 2009

Does the holiday season take a big chunk out of your reading time? Between weekends spent shopping, decorating, and socializing and the normal daily routine, I find that I have fewer opportunities to settle down with a book, unless I can squeeze in a day off here and there (which I am doing a couple of times before Christmas, and possibly more once I know what my son’s travel plans for the holidays are). My immediate reading agenda is to get through the next couple of reviews I have scheduled, and then I really want to goof off a bit – read for the challenges I’ll be starting, and/or read just whatever I feel like. That would make it something of a reading holiday, I think!

What sort of reading plans do you have between now and the end of the year?

✩✩✩✩Speaking of plans…the Southern California book-blogger contingent is planning to get together around noon on Saturday, December 5 at Portrait of a Bookstore in Studio City. We’ll have lunch at the adjoining Aroma Cafe, browse (maybe do some Christmas shopping?), and chat about blogging, books and whatever else comes to mind. If you can make it, we’d love to see you there!✩✩✩✩

Completed as of 11/24/09
I’m glad I signed on for this one, and I think liking it so much may be one reason I’m cutting back on accepting books for review. In the same spirit, but with a slightly different twist, I’ve decided to join the 2010 Reading From My Shelves Project hosted by Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea. That challenge has the additional requirement that participants must pass on their books once they’ve read them, and that’s something I normally do anyway. I will pledge to read 25 books for the challenge (which can cross with other challenges), which happens to be the just over the minimum of 20 allowed, but I’m now feeling a little more confident about a slightly bigger commitment.

Completed as of 11/4/09I guess I could have closed out this one sooner, but I wasn’t sure how much more I might accomplish in November. I did better than expected, but most of that is directly due to participating in the 24-Hour Readathon last month. I’m also choosing not to count an e-book for this challenge, since it doesn’t actually occupy a shelf.

Thanks to Lisa at Lit and Life for the “Over the Top” Award! There’s a quiz/meme that goes with the award and I’ll get to that later, but since I’m infamously negligent about acknowledging awards, I wanted to get to this one before I got too distracted :-).

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I’m unplugging from the blog for the next few days – there will be no new posts here until Sunday! Thanksgiving will be fairly low-key. None of our kids will be around, but my husband and I are hosting my dad and a friend of his for dinner. I’m roasting chicken breasts – yes, chicken, you read that correctly! – and potatoes, with some other veggies and a salad, and baking an apple crisp and […]

Karen is still thinking about holidays with this Weekend Assignment: Weekend Assignment #294: Thanksgiving is upon us, and it’s traditional to ask what you’re thankful for this year. But let’s tweak that a bit. As we prepare to finish off the first decade of a new century, let’s take a moment to appreciate the good things that have come about since 12/31/1999. What aspect of living in the 21st century are you most thankful about? […]

Disclosures: I purchased this to read as an e-book on my Amazon Kindle. *The purchasing link at the end of this review goes through my Amazon Associates account. The Help Kathryn Stockett ISBN 0399155341 / 9780399155345 Fiction (historical/literary), 2009 Kindle e-book edition Opening Lines: “Mae Mobley was born on a early Sunday morning in August 1960. A church baby we like to call it. Taking care a white babies, that’s what I do, along with […]

(Well, I wasn’t sure if I’d have a post up today, but what do you know? Here’s one after all!) I hadn’t expected to start thinking about my end-of-the-year book choices quite yet, but Weekly Geeks is a little bit ahead of me: This is a guest post by Jackie of Literary Escapism who has graciously offered to organize the Book Blogger Top 10 again this year. Welcome to the Weekly Geeks Book Bloggers Top […]

Audience Participation: Blogger Input Requested! This is a new one: I’ve been contacted by the author of an in-progress book on blogging professionally who would like to include interviews with some book bloggers who have found business success with their blogs. She’s actually looking for book reviewers here, not people who’ve used a blog to promote their own books, and “success” can be defined as meeting whatever income and/or recognition objectives you’ve set (acknowledging that […]

Audience Participation: Blogger Input Requested! Two items – one regional, one worldwide: If you’re a Southern California book blogger or author, have you given your input on a new site to help build up our connections to each other? If you missed the post about that earlier this week, or just haven’t responded yet, please read all about it and take our very short survey! Become part of a very ambitious project to collect one […]

If you pay any attention to the book business and the mainstream media, you’ve heard the uproar about the list of Top Ten Books of 2009 that Publishers Weekly announced a couple of weeks ago. Aside from the fact that it came out with nearly two months left in 2009 – is it like the award-eligibility period for the Grammys, where 2009 also includes the end of 2008? – people noticed pretty quickly that the […]

Is it beginning to look a lot like Christmas in your neck of the woods? Weekend Assignment #293: Halloween is behind us, Thanksgiving ahead, and Christmas advertising has begun. So how about it? When do the holidays begin for you? Do you avoid thinking about Christmas and Hanukkah until after Thanksgiving, or is any time after Halloween okay? Is it time for Christmas lights in your neighborhood, and do the neighbors agree with you? How […]

If I had to list all the things I love about blogging, “community” would be very high on the list. I’ve found several communities that feel a bit like home, but the book-blogging community is extra-special to me, and not just in its virtual form; I appreciate that I’ve been able to get to know some of my fellow Southern California book bloggers in so-called “real life” too. But I know there are a lot […]

Not long ago, my stepson brought a flyer home from school. It informed parents that on the evening of Picture Day, the photographers would be back at the school to take family portraits for those who were interested. Of course, the flyer came home the night before this was supposed to happen, so there wasn’t much time to plan. Besides, he and his sister would be at their mom’s house the night of the photo […]

I should know better, and yet every now and then I attempt it anyway. I’m currently reading polygamously – I have three books going at once. Technically, it’s four books, since one of them is a special edition containing two novels, but I’ve finished one of the stories in it; however, I won’t review that one until I finish the book itself. (I’m being a stickler, despite the fact that it may mean I won’t […]

Happy Friday! Here’s what I have to share with y’all this week: seven new-to-me blogs a collection of links that are a bit more thought-provoking than usual (must be something about autumn – the cool weather and short days must make some of us more reflective) a timely Blogthings personality quiz, and a Customer of the Week (fortunately, not my customer!) Also, if you haven’t already told me your favorite cover songs and your thoughts […]

“I’m on Facebook, but I’m not on Facebook – it just sucks up your time. And I’ve never even seen Twitter.” As you might guess, I was not the person who said that, but it got me thinking. I consider myself far from cutting-edge, but compared to a lot of people I know in my off-line life, I’m living in another dimension. I’m always thrilled to see one of them start using social networking, and […]

This week’s Weekend Assignment question is a simple one, but may require a bit of thought. Even if you don’t normally participate in these things, please take a moment to answer it in the comments below. Weekend Assignment #292: What is the oldest thing in your house or apartment? Extra Credit: Is there anything from your childhood that you’ve managed to hang on to all these years? I have to be honest: When I read […]